Thank you Marvelous Europe and XSEED Games for providing us with a review copy!

Cuisineer is a game about cooking. Cuisineer is a game about dungeon crawling. Cuisineer is a game about neglectful parents and heavy taxes. Cuisineer is a game where even the village children know how to describe their dinner with a gourmet chef's level of detail, even if that dish is nothing more than steamed rice or fried shrimp. The best chefs know how to combine the right ingredients to provide a dish that satisfies and leaves an impression that makes you dream of that dish again for the rest of your life. The rest of the chefs...make Cuisineer.

In this game, you play as Pom, a catgirl dungeoneer who receives a mysterious letter from her parents and rushes back to her hometown of Paell to make sure they're okay. When she gets there, she finds out that it was a ruse; her parents have gone off to see the world, leaving their restaurant in Pom's hands. Her friend Biscotti has been keeping an eye on things, but the actual success or failure of the restaurant lies squarely on Pom's shoulders. Not only does she now need to come up with a list of dishes to serve, she needs to procure all of the furniture, tools, cooking materials, and ingredients. As if that isn't enough, it turns out her parents have left Pom with a huge debt. The tax collector shows up almost immediately to tell Pom that if she doesn't pay up, the restaurant will be sold out from under her. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Of course, Pom knows how to get ingredients. The local dungeons are absolutely crawling with food-themed monsters, like little puffballs that drop flour or tadpole creatures that drop leafy greens. There are the more obvious ones, too, like boars that drop "tender meat" (pork) and bulls that drop "touch meat" (steak). The dungeons are also chock-full of rocks and trees to pummel into bits for wood and stone. Not only does each dungeon contain unique enemies for unique ingredients, they also all have a unique type of stone or wood used for different tiers of upgrades.

The combat itself is relatively basic, with just a few weapon types and some secondary ranged weapons; managing to get a hit in before the enemy usually stunlocks them, so most combat is as simple as good positioning and trying not to get surrounded. Each weapon also has a secondary attack with a cooldown that can do things like deal heavy damage or shove enemies away. However, each of the four pieces of equipment Pom can have (main weapon, secondary weapon, gloves, and boots) can have up to two modifiers that provide extra effects, like poisoning enemies or shielding Pom. With the right loadout, your entire combat flow can change.

Once she has the materials necessary, Pom can purchase and upgrade four cooking stations: a frying station, a soup station, a prep table, and an oven. Each one can only make certain recipes. Further, there are four tiers of recipe, and each station will need to be fully upgraded in order to make dishes of the higher tiers. Of course, all of these upgrades and purchases come at a price: money. Money Pom can essentially only earn by running her restaurant. This means Pom will have to juggle her time between running the restaurant and dungeon delving for resources.

Time in Cuisineer runs in a way that makes some sense, but at the expense of the overall experience. See, each day starts at 9AM, and ends automatically at midnight. You can choose to open and close the restaurant at your whim throughout the day. There are 3 major eating periods during the day: the lunch rush, tea time, and the dinner rush. However, if you don't leave to get to the dungeons before dinner time, Pom will declare that it's too late to leave, and you will lose out on any opportunity to hunt for resources until the next day. Not only this, but the longer you stay in town before leaving for the dungeons, the more "tired" Pom becomes, resulting in her max health being reduced by some percentage until the next day.

On the other hand, time doesn't pass in the dungeons. Once you're there, you can spend as much time as you want combing through and hunting down every enemy. Each dungeon has 5 layers, with a miniboss partway through and a bigger boss at the end. You cannot go up a layer once you've gone down, but you can leave anytime you want (though Pom needs a good amount of time to "channel the magic" necessary to leave, leaving her vulnerable to attack if you're not careful). Once you return home from the dungeons, the time will automatically be set to 10PM, leaving you with two hours to store your goods, make any last-minute upgrades, and crawl into bed.

Of course, Pom's inventory space is limited. She can upgrade her pack, too, but only up to 40 slots. Weapons and armor take up a whole slot unto themselves, and all other items and ingredients form into stacks of 30. Considering some upgrades require close to 100 individual pieces of wood and/or stone, and considering extra equipment is the only thing you can directly sell in town, it's pretty easy to completely fill up your pack long before you leave the dungeon. But if you die in the dungeon, you drop everything in your pack except whatever is in the first four slots and, if you click to the next screen after death, immediately get sent to the next day. There is no way to increase the number of items you retain, not even when you increase the number of slots in your bag. It just means you have more to lose by dying the further into the game you get.

I needed to explain all of these mechanics up front because they all tie together to make Cuisineer an unforgiving resource-management experience. You're constantly juggling trying to earn enough money with actually having the things necessary to run the restaurant. You can get a decent chunk of change during the lunch rush, but the real bulk of your earnings come during the dinner rush. If you open for lunch and then head to the dungeon, you enter the dungeons with a hit to your max health, making it more likely for you to die. Going to the dungeons first gives you max health, but you lose out on all opportunity to make money that day. And of course staying open until dinner means no going to the dungeons. Given that time runs at a rate of one in-game minute per real-world second, you are either looking at 15 straight minutes of simple restaurant management or 5-10 minutes of that followed by 20-30 minutes of dungeon exploration. If you then die, losing 36 stacks of resources while only getting to keep 4 essentially means the entire day is wasted: you got the short end of the stick both in the money-making and the resource-gathering portions of the game. It has been a very long time since a game made me so angry to die. Most of the time, I actually opted to hard-quit the game process to reset me back to the beginning of the day.

Worst of all, the game only saves when you sleep. By itself, this is fine, though again, it does mean a very unforgiving death experience. The issue is that there is no way to close the game mid-day without losing all of your progress for the day. This means that, if you're playing on PC instead of console, you will have no way to suspend play except to pause the game and leave it running. I'm a dad. I've got a house full of kids and animals. Simply finding time to play long enough to finish a game is a chore sometimes; not having the ability to put it down immediately when needed is immensely frustrating. So much of my frustration with Cuisineer could be solved just by having an extra save when entering the dungeons; then, if you die, you don't have to choose between losing just your items or losing the entire day's progress, and I could turn the game off mid-dungeon without worrying about also losing the money and upgrades I made before heading out of town.

There are other systems in play to help you stay alive while in the dungeons, at least. There are ways to upgrade your armor and to change what modifiers they have. However, you can only upgrade one piece of equipment per day; you have to spend more of your wood, stone, and money to do it; and you don't have access to that piece of equipment until the upgrade is finished at the top of the next day. This meant that, most of the time, I didn't bother. I finished the game with a completely unupgraded set of equipment.

There is also a shop where you can buy healing items in the form of boba tea. You can also upgrade these, unlocking new recipes by trading dishes and ingredients with the shopkeepers. Again, this means spending your ingredients that you've been fighting for to create new healing items that can both heal you and damage enemies or to increase the amount of healing done to you. And, surprise surprise, you are limited in how many boba teas you can take with you by the number of belt slots you have, which can be upgraded to four by spending even more at a different shop.

The end result, gameplay-wise, is that I constantly felt pressed for time, pressed for resources, and ended up spending real-world hours repeatedly smacking rocks and trees in each dungeon and leaving by the third level of each dungeon because my pack was already full or because I could not risk dying while I was in there. And that's not even getting into the other, more minor frustrations, like not being able to see what you need to upgrade the boba tea after leaving the shop and hoping you memorized the right dishes to make, or the story inconsistencies, or the way the game doesn't teach you how to save your ingredients from being used when running the restaurant so you can save them to fulfill an active quest. I found ways to work around these things, like writing down what I needed to make, or finding out that you can partially fulfill quests by giving NPCs a portion of what they've asked for, but they are things that didn't have to be problems at all, and little would have had to change.

There are part of this game that do work, though. The restaurant management aspect is fun; you get to layout the seating however you want, change the look, hang up decorations, decide where you want your cooking stations placed, then serve hungry customers and try to make sure you have enough seating for the masses. The fly in the ointment here is mainly the controls for actually organizing the store layout; the little hand you use to select items is picky about precisely where you click before it picks up tables and chairs to let you move them. And if you're going too fast, try to pick up a table and fail, click Y, and then click "Yes", you'll actually store every single thing in the restaurant and have to start the layout all over again.

Visually and musically, Cuisineer has a light, colorful tone. All of the dungeons are well lit, and everything has a cartoonish aspect. Character portraits are done in a bright anime style. Music is full of woodwinds and medium tempos. And Pom's attacks all have punchy sounds. It can get a little hard to see what you're doing in the dungeons, though; the camera is very zoomed out, and enemies like flour puffs and rice warriors are very small. If you have "sour" effects on your equipment, lightning will chain between nearby enemies, obscuring what is attacking you and what attack animations they are doing.

Morally, this game doesn't have a lot of concerning content. There is no blood during combat, Pom can never die, and defeated enemies simply disappear. The villagers believe in a pantheon of gods, whom they pray to and revere by using the capital G when referring to them in speech. The ESRB rating mentioned alcohol references, but I never saw any during my playtime. The most there is to speak of is the presentation of some of the women in the game. Most females in the game have their breasts pushed outward prominently for some reason. A handful of them have visible cleavage, and the sisters who run the boba tea shop are particularly well-endowed with low-cut tops and skirts slit all the way up to their waists. There is also an NPC who has romantic/lustful interest in Pom, constantly talking to her in an off-putting way and calling her "little-kitty", much to her discomfort.

Cuisineer has good ingredients. The art and music are pleasant, the calendar system with holidays and events makes for a more dynamic world, and the little touches like the food-themed weapons and food-named characters are charming. In the right hands, it could have been a delicious experience. With less resource grinding, more save and suspend flexibility, and a few other quality of life tweaks, this could have been a good game, perhaps even great. But underdone as it is, the whole experience has just left me salty.

- maestro_dana